Diane Ravitch: When you realize that your history books and your scien...

Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.

Diane Ravitch

intelligent shining education

American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?

Diane Ravitch

business education school

Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.

Diane Ravitch

curriculum children school

Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?

Diane Ravitch

teacher children thinking

There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions.

Diane Ravitch

common-purpose powerful running

Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or or the police department

Diane Ravitch

police fire school

Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.

Diane Ravitch

passive understanding decision

Unless the schools provide our children with a vision of human possibility that enlightens and empowers them with knowledge and taste, they will simply play their role in someone else's marketing schemes. Unless they understand deeply the sources of our democracy, they will take it for granted and fail to exercise their rights and responsibilities.

Diane Ravitch

responsibility children school

Teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions

Diane Ravitch

working-conditions teaching teacher

Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.

Diane Ravitch

legislature states teacher

What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.

Diane Ravitch

errors running thinking

The ladder was there, from the gutter to the university, and for those stalwart enough to ascend it, the schools were a boon and a path out of poverty.

Diane Ravitch

gutters ladders school

Those who can’t teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers.

Diane Ravitch

teach law teacher

American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.

Diane Ravitch

stupid past ideas

The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.

Diane Ravitch

complacency obstacles reform

Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.

Diane Ravitch

accountability goal

What is happening to teachers now across this nation is a disgrace. The attacks on them are a blot on our nation. Teachers and students are not different interest groups. Anyone who demeans teachers demeans education and hurts children.

Diane Ravitch

hurt teacher children

When you succeed at keeping almost everyone in school, you must figure out ways to educate everyone you keep in school.

Diane Ravitch

succeed way school

Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They should be able to take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program.

Diane Ravitch

educational teacher children

I support charters, but the right kind of charters. I support charters that support kids who have the highest needs. A charter should be targeting students who are in serious trouble. It should serve students who didn't succeed in public schools when it can help them. Or, at least, charters should agree to accept similar proportions of the kids with the highest needs.

Diane Ravitch

support kids school

When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.